This patch adds the pseudo-types anycompatible, anycompatiblearray,
anycompatiblenonarray, and anycompatiblerange. They work much like
anyelement, anyarray, anynonarray, and anyrange respectively, except
that the actual input values need not match precisely in type.
Instead, if we can find a common supertype (using the same rules
as for UNION/CASE type resolution), then the parser automatically
promotes the input values to that type. For example,
"myfunc(anycompatible, anycompatible)" can match a call with one
integer and one bigint argument, with the integer automatically
promoted to bigint. With anyelement in the definition, the user
would have had to cast the integer explicitly.
The new types also provide a second, independent set of type variables
for function matching; thus with "myfunc(anyelement, anyelement,
anycompatible) returns anycompatible" the first two arguments are
constrained to be the same type, but the third can be some other
type, and the result has the type of the third argument. The need
for more than one set of type variables was foreseen back when we
first invented the polymorphic types, but we never did anything
about it.
Pavel Stehule, revised a bit by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFj8pRDna7VqNi8gR+Tt2Ktmz0cq5G93guc3Sbn_NVPLdXAkqA@mail.gmail.com
Aggregates have acquired a dozen or so optional attributes in recent
years for things like parallel query and moving-aggregate mode; the
lack of an OR REPLACE option to add or change these for an existing
agg makes extension upgrades gratuitously hard. Rectify.
We have a lot of code in which option names, which from the user's
viewpoint are logically keywords, are passed through the grammar as plain
identifiers, and then matched to string literals during command execution.
This approach avoids making words into lexer keywords unnecessarily. Some
places matched these strings using plain strcmp, some using pg_strcasecmp.
But the latter should be unnecessary since identifiers would have been
downcased on their way through the parser. Aside from any efficiency
concerns (probably not a big factor), the lack of consistency in this area
creates a hazard of subtle bugs due to different places coming to different
conclusions about whether two option names are the same or different.
Hence, standardize on using strcmp() to match any option names that are
expected to have been fed through the parser.
This does create a user-visible behavioral change, which is that while
formerly all of these would work:
alter table foo set (fillfactor = 50);
alter table foo set (FillFactor = 50);
alter table foo set ("fillfactor" = 50);
alter table foo set ("FillFactor" = 50);
now the last case will fail because that double-quoted identifier is
different from the others. However, none of our documentation says that
you can use a quoted identifier in such contexts at all, and we should
discourage doing so since it would break if we ever decide to parse such
constructs as true lexer keywords rather than poor man's substitutes.
So this shouldn't create a significant compatibility issue for users.
Daniel Gustafsson, reviewed by Michael Paquier, small changes by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/29405B24-564E-476B-98C0-677A29805B84@yesql.se
Up to now, there's been hard-wired assumptions that normal aggregates'
final functions never modify their transition states, while ordered-set
aggregates' final functions always do. This has always been a bit
limiting, and in particular it's getting in the way of improving the
built-in ordered-set aggregates to allow merging of transition states.
Therefore, let's introduce catalog and CREATE AGGREGATE infrastructure
that lets the finalfn's behavior be declared explicitly.
There are now three possibilities for the finalfn behavior: it's purely
read-only, it trashes the transition state irrecoverably, or it changes
the state in such a way that no more transfn calls are possible but the
state can still be passed to other, compatible finalfns. There are no
examples of this third case today, but we'll shortly make the built-in
OSAs act like that.
This change allows user-defined aggregates to explicitly disclaim support
for use as window functions, and/or to prevent transition state merging,
if their implementations cannot handle that. While it was previously
possible to handle the window case with a run-time error check, there was
not any way to prevent transition state merging, which in retrospect is
something commit 804163bc2 should have provided for. But better late
than never.
In passing, split out pg_aggregate.c's extern function declarations into
a new header file pg_aggregate_fn.h, similarly to what we've done for
some other catalog headers, so that pg_aggregate.h itself can be safe
for frontend files to include. This lets pg_dump use the symbolic
names for relevant constants.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/4834.1507849699@sss.pgh.pa.us
The original specification for this called for the deserialization function
to have signature "deserialize(serialtype) returns transtype", which is a
security violation if transtype is INTERNAL (which it always would be in
practice) and serialtype is not (which ditto). The patch blithely overrode
the opr_sanity check for that, which was sloppy-enough work in itself,
but the indisputable reason this cannot be allowed to stand is that CREATE
FUNCTION will reject such a signature and thus it'd be impossible for
extensions to create parallelizable aggregates.
The minimum fix to make the signature type-safe is to add a second, dummy
argument of type INTERNAL. But to lock it down a bit more and make misuse
of INTERNAL-accepting functions less likely, let's get rid of the ability
to specify a "serialtype" for an aggregate and just say that the only
useful serialtype is BYTEA --- which, in practice, is the only interesting
value anyway, due to the usefulness of the send/recv infrastructure for
this purpose. That means we only have to allow "serialize(internal)
returns bytea" and "deserialize(bytea, internal) returns internal" as
the signatures for these support functions.
In passing fix bogus signature of int4_avg_combine, which I found thanks
to adding an opr_sanity check on combinefunc signatures.
catversion bump due to removing pg_aggregate.aggserialtype and adjusting
signatures of assorted built-in functions.
David Rowley and Tom Lane
Discussion: <27247.1466185504@sss.pgh.pa.us>
has_parallel_hazard() was ignoring the proparallel markings for
aggregates, which is no good. Fix that. There was no way to mark
an aggregate as actually being parallel-safe, either, so add a
PARALLEL option to CREATE AGGREGATE.
Patch by me, reviewed by David Rowley.
This lets us use parallel aggregate for a variety of useful cases
that didn't work before, like sum(int8), sum(numeric), several
versions of avg(), and various other functions.
Add some regression tests, as well, testing the general sanity of
these and future catalog entries.
David Rowley, reviewed by Tomas Vondra, with a few further changes
by me.
Aggregate nodes now have two new modes: a "partial" mode where they
output the unfinalized transition state, and a "finalize" mode where
they accept unfinalized transition states rather than individual
values as input.
These new modes are not used anywhere yet, but they will be necessary
for parallel aggregation. The infrastructure also figures to be
useful for cases where we want to aggregate local data and remote
data via the FDW interface, and want to bring back partial aggregates
from the remote side that can then be combined with locally generated
partial aggregates to produce the final value. It may also be useful
even when neither FDWs nor parallelism are in play, as explained in
the comments in nodeAgg.c.
David Rowley and Simon Riggs, reviewed by KaiGai Kohei, Heikki
Linnakangas, Haribabu Kommi, and me.
Before 9.4, such an aggregate couldn't be declared, because its final
function would have to have polymorphic result type but no polymorphic
argument, which CREATE FUNCTION would quite properly reject. The
ordered-set-aggregate patch found a workaround: allow the final function
to be declared as accepting additional dummy arguments that have types
matching the aggregate's regular input arguments. However, we failed
to notice that this problem applies just as much to regular aggregates,
despite the fact that we had a built-in regular aggregate array_agg()
that was known to be undeclarable in SQL because its final function
had an illegal signature. So what we should have done, and what this
patch does, is to decouple the extra-dummy-arguments behavior from
ordered-set aggregates and make it generally available for all aggregate
declarations. We have to put this into 9.4 rather than waiting till
later because it slightly alters the rules for declaring ordered-set
aggregates.
The patch turned out a bit bigger than I'd hoped because it proved
necessary to record the extra-arguments option in a new pg_aggregate
column. I'd thought we could just look at the final function's pronargs
at runtime, but that didn't work well for variadic final functions.
It's probably just as well though, because it simplifies life for pg_dump
to record the option explicitly.
While at it, fix array_agg() to have a valid final-function signature,
and add an opr_sanity test to notice future deviations from polymorphic
consistency. I also marked the percentile_cont() aggregates as not
needing extra arguments, since they don't.
Until now, when executing an aggregate function as a window function
within a window with moving frame start (that is, any frame start mode
except UNBOUNDED PRECEDING), we had to recalculate the aggregate from
scratch each time the frame head moved. This patch allows an aggregate
definition to include an alternate "moving aggregate" implementation
that includes an inverse transition function for removing rows from
the aggregate's running state. As long as this can be done successfully,
runtime is proportional to the total number of input rows, rather than
to the number of input rows times the average frame length.
This commit includes the core infrastructure, documentation, and regression
tests using user-defined aggregates. Follow-on commits will update some
of the built-in aggregates to use this feature.
David Rowley and Florian Pflug, reviewed by Dean Rasheed; additional
hacking by me
This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
Formerly the planner had a hard-wired rule of thumb for guessing the amount
of space consumed by an aggregate function's transition state data. This
estimate is critical to deciding whether it's OK to use hash aggregation,
and in many situations the built-in estimate isn't very good. This patch
adds a column to pg_aggregate wherein a per-aggregate estimate can be
provided, overriding the planner's default, and infrastructure for setting
the column via CREATE AGGREGATE.
It may be that additional smarts will be required in future, perhaps even
a per-aggregate estimation function. But this is already a step forward.
This is extracted from a larger patch to improve the performance of numeric
and int8 aggregates. I (tgl) thought it was worth reviewing and committing
this infrastructure separately. In this commit, all built-in aggregates
are given aggtransspace = 0, so no behavior should change.
Hadi Moshayedi, reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Tomas Vondra
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function. At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.
Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally. Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
the opportunity to treat COUNT(*) as a zero-argument aggregate instead
of the old hack that equated it to COUNT(1); this is materially cleaner
(no more weird ANYOID cases) and ought to be at least a tiny bit faster.
Original patch by Sergey Koposov; review, documentation, simple regression
tests, pg_dump and psql support by moi.
large objects. Dump all these in pg_dump; also add code to pg_dump
user-defined conversions. Make psql's large object code rely on
the backend for inserting/deleting LOB comments, instead of trying to
hack pg_description directly. Documentation and regression tests added.
Christopher Kings-Lynne, code reviewed by Tom
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
Tom Lane
Andrew Gierth
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Thomas G. Lockhart
Marc G. Fournier